Howards End by E.M. Forster | PenguinRandomHouse.com Add to Cart About Howards End First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. At its heart lie two families—the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked—some very funny, some very tragic—that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes’ charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, “Only connect,” remains a powerful prescription for modern life. Introduction by Alfred Kazan (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) From the Hardcover edition.

About Howards End "Only Connect," Forster’s key aphorism, informs this novel about an English country house, Howards End, and its influence on the lives of the wealthy and materialistic Wilcoxes; the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters; and the poor bank clerk Leonard Bast. Bringing together people from different classes and nations by way of sympathetic insight and understanding, Howards End eloquently addresses the question "Who shall inherit England?" (Lionel Trilling). About Howards End What makes this masterpiece a pure delight for contemporary readers is its vibrant portrait of life in Edwardian England, and the wonderful characters who inhabit the charming old country house in Hertfordshire called Howards End. This cozy house becomes the object of an inheritance dispute between the upright conservative Wilcox family and the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, sensitive and intuitive women loved by men willing to leap wide social barriers to fulfill their ardor. Through romantic entanglements, disappearing wills, and sudden tragedy, the conflict over the house emerges as a symbolic struggle for England’s future. Rich with the tradition, spirit, and wit distinctively English, Howards End is a remarkable novel of rare insight and understanding.

As in his celebrated A Passage to India, E. M. Forster brings to vivid life a country and an era through the destinies of his unforgettable characters. About Howards End First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. At its heart lie two families—the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked—some very funny, some very tragic—that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes’ charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, “Only connect,” remains a powerful prescription for modern life.

Introduction by Alfred Kazan (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) About Howards End "Only Connect," Forster’s key aphorism, informs this novel about an English country house, Howards End, and its influence on the lives of the wealthy and materialistic Wilcoxes; the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters; and the poor bank clerk Leonard Bast. Bringing together people from different classes and nations by way of sympathetic insight and understanding, Howards End eloquently addresses the question "Who shall inherit England?" (Lionel Trilling). About Howards End Howards End is a classic English novel . . . superb and wholly cherishable . . . one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again," said Alfred Kazin. First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. At its heart lie two families–the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels.

When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked–some very funny, some very tragic–that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes’ charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, "Only connect," remains a powerful prescription for modern life. "Howards End is undoubtedly Forster’s masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light," wrote the critic Lionel Trilling. Get the news you want from Penguin Random House Praise With a new Introduction by James Ivory Commentary by Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Bradbury, and Joseph Epstein "Howards End is a classic English novel . . . superb and wholly cherishable . . . one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again," said Alfred Kazin. First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer.

At its heart lie two families—the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked—some very funny, some very tragic—that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes’ charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, "Only connect," remains a powerful prescription for modern life. "Howards End is undoubtedly Forster’s masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light," wrote the critic Lionel Trilling. About E.M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born January 1, 1879 in London and was raised from infancy by his mother and paternal aunts after his father’s death. Forster’s boyhood experiences at the Tonbridge School, Kent were an unpleasant contrast to the happiness… More about E.M. Forster About E.M.

Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born January 1, 1879 in London and was raised from infancy by his mother and paternal aunts after his father’s death. Forster’s boyhood experiences at the Tonbridge School, Kent were an unpleasant contrast to the happiness… More about E.M. Forster About E.M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born January 1, 1879 in London and was raised from infancy by his mother and paternal aunts after his father’s death. Forster’s boyhood experiences at the Tonbridge School, Kent were an unpleasant contrast to the happiness… More about E.M. Forster About E. M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879, attended Tonbridge School as a day boy, and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King’s he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in… More about E. M. Forster About E.M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born January 1, 1879 in London and was raised from infancy by his mother and paternal aunts after his father’s death.

Forster’s boyhood experiences at the Tonbridge School, Kent were an unpleasant contrast to the happiness… More about E.M. Forster About E.M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born January 1, 1879 in London and was raised from infancy by his mother and paternal aunts after his father’s death. Forster’s boyhood experiences at the Tonbridge School, Kent were an unpleasant contrast to the happiness… More about E.M. Forster Product Details Howards End by E. M. Forster - Reading Guide - PenguinRandomHouse.com Questions and Topics for Discussion INTRODUCTION “The more people one knows, the easier it is to replace them. It is one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.” The place that E. M. Forster loved so deeply that he made it the centerpiece of one of his best-loved novels was a country house just north of London called Rooksnest. From the moment he moved in with his mother at age four, “I took it to my heart and hoped . . .

that I would live and die there.” Much more than just a house, for Forster, Rooksnest came to represent English country values—a connection to place, a respect for individuality, and a commitment to the contemplative life—that were increasingly threatened by the urbanization and industrialization sweeping Edwardian England. Forster’s childhood idyll was to last only ten years, for at fourteen he moved with his mother to the newly fashionable bourgeois suburb of Tonbridge Wells, home to many members of the growing business class that would become a central concern of his fiction. In Tonbridge Wells, Forster met families who, like the Wilcoxes of Howards End, were energetic capitalists focused on motorcars and moneymaking. And if Tonbridge Wells gave rise to the Wilcoxes, Cambridge was the likely birthplace of the other central family of Howards End, the Schlegels. It was as a university student at King’s College that Forster was first inspired by the liberal humanism of philosopher George Moore, who advocated the contemplation of beauty and the cultivation of personal relations as a spiritual antidote to the rootless, mechanistic ethos of his age.

Forster, together with the young men who would later form the Bloomsbury group of writers (Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, among others), embraced this challenge to traditional religious morality and to the growing commercial spirit of the time. Forster spent some of his happiest days in this company, a lifestyle mirrored in the Schlegels’ passion for art, friendship, and the life of the mind. Yet, like the Schlegel sisters, he was not completely satisfied by life among the London literati. More importantly, he was starting to understand the practicality of conformist values, of “social conventions, economic trend, efficiency,” and he grew acutely aware of the limitations of liberal ideals. The Bloomsbury group’s sitting-room debates and fashionable walking-parties were for Forster too narrow, too disdainful of the economic and material conditions that made their way of life possible. Against this backdrop, the character of Margaret emerged—her curious attraction to Henry, her appreciation of money, her pragmatism.

Unlike her sister Helen, whose brief entrancement with the dynamic Wilcox men quickly evolves into contempt for them, Margaret, like the man who created her, envisions a marriage of soul and body, country and city, passion and prose, culture and commerce. While Forster created the Wilcox and Schlegel families and the England they inhabit from his own experiences, the interior lives of Leonard Bast and Jacky were drawn purely from imagination. Leonard, a poor insurance clerk only a few steps removed from his rural, working-class roots, hopes to “come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus.” To Forster, who believed that “the character of the English is essentially middle-class,” it was people like Leonard and the Wilcoxes—aspiring to wealth, political power, and culture—who would eventually “inherit” England, not the dying aristocratic class of the Schlegels nor the working classes. Forster used Leonard’s connection with the Schlegels as the social conscience of the book.

As critic Wilfred Stone wrote, “Just as [Leonard] stands on the edge of the social Ôabyss,’ so he affords the Schlegels a glimpse into it— increasing both their ‘panic and emptiness’ and their guilt over class and money.” Because Forster did not keep comprehensive journals during his most fertile period as a writer and later destroyed some of his diaries, it is not possible to trace the entire composition of Howards End. It is known that the outline for the book crystallized sometime in 1908, about two years after Forster made a trip to the countryside to spend time with the Postens, an oddly matched stockbroker and his clever, cultured second wife who provided the immediate model for the relationship between Henry and Margaret. In a journal entry of February 1910, Forster wrote, “Am grinding out my novel into a contrast between money and death—the latter is truly an ally of the personal against the mechanical.” Clearly the advancing machine age was at the forefront of Forster’s consciousness at the time. With the social issues of man versus machine, country versus city, and culture versus money weighing on his mind, Forster completed his fourth novel.

Published in November 1910, Howards End was greeted with glorious reviews, making Forster a literary star. Over the years, Howards End has remained one of Forster’s most beloved novels. Few works combine social comedy and political commentary with the skillful characterizations seen in the Schlegel sisters. Writing during a time of lively discussion about his country’s socioeconomic conditions, Forster conceived the work as a “condition-of-England novel,” a work designed to enter Edwardian debates about wealth and poverty, art and pragmatism, country life and urban sprawl that would not have sounded unfamiliar in Thatcher’s England or Reagan’s America. Forster, with a comic suspicion of the dogmas championed by liberals and conservatives alike, provides a distinctly humanistic perspective on some of the central debates of his time and ours. Ultimately, Howards End is the most optimistic expression of Forster’s unique vision, a sensibility that transcends the temporal confines of his novel. Its richly drawn characters and the struggles they face—to maintain human connection in an increasingly depersonalized society, to find a spiritual home in the world—are still as current as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century. ABOUT THE E.M.

FORSTER Edward Morgan Forster was born on New Year’s Day, 1879, in Dorset Square, London, the second child (the first died soon after birth) of middle-class parents, Edward Llewellyn Forster, a Cambridge graduate and architect, and Alice Clara “Lily” Whichelo. When his son was just one, Forster’s father died after a long battle with consumption, leaving the family little money and making Lily a widow at twenty-five. Unwilling to live with relatives and unable to afford a London apartment, Lily moved to a house in the English countryside, Rooksnest, where she devoted herself to her son. At Rooksnest, Forster’s life was spent in the nurturing, overprotective “haze of elderly ladies” that included paternal aunts and Lily’s friends, and he formed a deep emotional attachment to the place, drawing later on the memories for Howards End. When Forster was fourteen years old, he and Lily faced the disheartening news that their lease at Rooksnest was up, and they sadly moved to the suburb of Tonbridge Wells. Here, Forster attended the boarding school as a day boy, with classics as his major study.

At Tonbridge he wrote for the school newspaper and won several awards for his essays, but nonetheless it was here, a place that contrasted so sharply with his happy home life, where his feelings of being an outsider hardened into an abiding distaste for the English school system. Forster’s intellectual and social life blossomed when, in 1897, he entered King’s College, Cambridge. With the guidance and encouragement of his classics professor, Forster grew to admire the modern European writers Tolstoy, Proust, and Ibsen, and began to test his own powers as a writer. It was during these years, too, that he first began to acknowledge his homosexuality, falling in love with another undergraduate, H. O. Meredith, who would be the center of his posthumously published novel Maurice (finished in 1914). Meredith helped Forster become a member of the “Apostles,” the university’s foremost discussion group, where he formed friendships with many of the intellectuals later associated with the Bloomsbury group in London.

In 1901, with his formal education over and uncertain about a career, Forster, accompanied by Lily, set off on a year-long trip to Italy to study Italian history, language, art, and literature, and to work on a novel-in-progress. In 1903 he published his first short story, “Albergo Empedocle,” and soon thereafter started to write for the Independent Review, a social and political journal founded by his Cambridge friends, to which he would contribute regularly for many years. His first three published novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908) received generally favorable reviews and made him a minor literary celebrity, but not until the publication of Howards End (1910) did Forster achieve major acclaim as a writer. During 1912 and 1913 Forster journeyed to India, beginning a lifelong fascination with the subcontinent. A return journey to India in 1921 provided the inspiration for A Passage to India (1924), which was hailed as a masterpiece on publication.

After writing five novels in succession, then ending a fourteen-year hiatus with A Passage to India, Forster retired as a novelist at the age of forty-five. He spent the second half of his life as a voracious reader, reviewer, and supporter of young writers such as J. R. Ackerley and Eudora Welty. A prominent public intellectual, Forster became the first president of England’s National Council on Civil Liberties and was a lifelong spokesman for personal and political tolerance, testifying in the trial that successfully overturned the ban on D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. King’s College awarded Forster an honorary fellowship in 1946, and he spent the rest of his years in Cambridge. Leading an active literary and social life to the end, Forster died in 1970 at age 91. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS The differences between the two Schlegel sisters are highlighted in their reactions to Beethoven: Helen “can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood,” while Margaret “can see only the music.” Discuss the disparity in their outlooks and how this leads to disagreements, for example, over Leonard Bast and Henry Wilcox.

Given Forster’s portrayal of Henry Wilcox, what do you think attracts Margaret to him? Why does she accept his proposal of marriage, even though she admits to her sister that she does not love him? Does she grow to love him in the end? Compared to more radical modernist contemporaries like D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford, Forster’s retention of the omniscient narrator appears conservative and traditional. Yet the narrator’s “omniscience” is distinctively qualified and tentative: “It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not.” Whose viewpoint (or viewpoints) does the narrator convey? The juxtaposition of masculine principles (money, logic, conquest, the external life) and feminine principles (spirit, intuition, accommodation, the inner life) is perhaps best embodied in the characters of Henry and Helen. Margaret, however, is less stereotypically feminine and maternal, saying “I do not love children.

I am thankful I have none.” The narrator tells us that “On the whole she sided with men as they are.” When Margaret ultimately “charged straight through these Wilcoxes” and united Helen and Henry at Howards End, was it a victory in the masculine or feminine mode? Leonard Bast is portrayed as a spiritual orphan, “sucked into the town” and loosed from the moorings of his working-class origins. Are the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels responsible for his death? To what extent is his ascent from poverty hindered by his own personal limitations and ambitions? Although Forster’s work is not conventionally religious, he frequently expresses a deep spirituality. Discuss the spiritual outlook expressed in Margaret’s contemplation on love (Chapter XX), Mrs. Wilcox’s bond with the English countryside, and Helen’s “mind that readily shreds the visible.” “I’m broken—I’m ended,” says Henry Wilcox as he contemplates his son’s imminent arrest near the end of the book. Has Henry in fact changed at the end of the novel? Have his values been transformed by his marriage to Margaret? Before their marriage the narrator asserts that Henry “did alter her character—a little.” Is that true?

In the final chapter, Margaret and Helen’s vista from Howards End is spoiled only by the “red rust” in the distance, the mark of London encroaching on the pristine landscape. Discuss Forster’s view of technology and his hope for a civilization that will “rest on the earth.” Images of water are repeatedly evoked in Howards End to suggest the dynamic ebb and flow of life, “progress,” and the rush of time. London is a place where “all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, [are] streaming away.” Contrast these images with the farm house, wych-elm, and meadow that bind the characters to the earth and the past. “More and more,” Margaret protests, “do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it. . . . Hurray for riches!” Margaret’s vigorous defense of the material basis of her lifestyle, a defense that shocks some of her family and friends, reflects Forster’s own reexamination of the antibusiness, antimaterialist sentiments he had imbibed during his university education. How do her comments highlight the limitations of both the intellectuals’ and the capitalists’ attitudes toward wealth?

Why can’t she and her family ultimately help the Leonard Basts of the world— let alone the “unthinkable” poorer classes—financially? On the surface, Ruth Wilcox is very different from Margaret Schlegel: unworldly, apolitical, more easily accepting of her husband’s ways and views. On what basis does she sense such a close bond with Margaret and come to see her as the proper “spiritual heir” of Howards End? What does Margaret mean when she says to Helen, “I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman’s mind”? Howards End : E. M. Forster : 9780141182131 E. M. Forster Classics About E. M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879. He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before the First World War, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India.

It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Maurice, his novel on a homosexual theme, finished in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian State of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross in the First World War); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd. He died in June 1970. show more Review quote With a new Introduction by James IvoryCommentary by Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Bradbury, and Joseph Epstein "Howards End is a classic English novel . . . superb and wholly cherishable . . . one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again," said Alfred Kazin. First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer.

At its heart lie two families the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked some very funny, some very tragic that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes' charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, "Only connect," remains a powerful prescription for modern life. "Howards End is undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light," wrote the critic Lionel Trilling." show more Review Text With a new Introduction by James Ivory Commentary by Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Bradbury, and Joseph Epstein " Howards End is a classic English novel . . . superb and wholly cherishable . . . one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again," said Alfred Kazin. First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M.

Forster recognition as a major writer. At its heart lie two families-the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked-some very funny, some very tragic-that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes' charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, "Only connect," remains a powerful prescription for modern life. " Howards End is undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light," wrote the critic Lionel Trilling. show more Follow us Howards End : E. M. Forster : 9780141182131 E. M. Forster Classics About E. M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born in London in 1879.

He wrote six novels, four of which appeared before the First World War, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910). An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India. It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Maurice, his novel on a homosexual theme, finished in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian State of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross in the First World War); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Britten's opera Billy Budd. He died in June 1970.

show more Review quote With a new Introduction by James IvoryCommentary by Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Bradbury, and Joseph Epstein "Howards End is a classic English novel . . . superb and wholly cherishable . . . one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again," said Alfred Kazin. First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. At its heart lie two families the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked some very funny, some very tragic that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes' charming country home. As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, "Only connect," remains a powerful prescription for modern life.

"Howards End is undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light," wrote the critic Lionel Trilling." show more Review Text With a new Introduction by James Ivory Commentary by Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Bradbury, and Joseph Epstein " Howards End is a classic English novel . . . superb and wholly cherishable . . . one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again," said Alfred Kazin. First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer. At its heart lie two families-the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked-some very funny, some very tragic-that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes' charming country home.

As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the classes, Howards End is a novel whose central tenet, "Only connect," remains a powerful prescription for modern life. " Howards End is undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light," wrote the critic Lionel Trilling. show more Follow us A Room with a View and Howard's End by E.M. Forster | PenguinRandomHouse.com About A Room with a View and Howard’s End Selected by the Modern Library as two of the 100 best novels of all time ‘To me,’ D. H. Lawerence once wrote to E. M. forster, ‘you are the last Englishman.’ Indeed, Forster’s novels offer contemporary readers clear, vibrant portraits of life in Edwardian England. Published in 1908 to both critical and popular acclaim, A Room with a View is a whimsical comedy of manners that owes more to Jane Austen that perhaps any other of his works.

The central character is a muddled young girl named Lucy Honeychurch, who runs away from the man who stirs her emotions, remaining engaged to a rich snob. Forster considered it his ‘nicest’ novel, and today it remains probably his most well liked. Its moral is utterly simple. Throw away your etiquette book and listen to your heart. But it was Forster’s next book, Howards End, a story about who would inhabit a charming old country house (and who, in a larger sense, would inherit England), that earned him recognition as a major writer. Centered around the conflict between the wealthy, materialistic Wilcox family and the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters-and informed by Forester’s famous dictum ‘Only connect’-it is full of tenderness towards favorite characters. ‘Howards End is a classic English novel . . . superb and wholly cherishable . . . one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again,’ said Alfred Kazin. Get the news you want from Penguin Random House About E.M. Forster Edward Morgan Forster was born January 1, 1879 in London and was raised from infancy by his mother and paternal aunts after his father’s death.

Forster’s boyhood experiences at the Tonbridge School, Kent were an unpleasant contrast to the happiness… More about E.M. Forster Product Details E.M. Forster - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. E.M. Forster Biography of E.M. Forster E. M. Forster (1879-1970), noted English author wrote Howards End (1910); The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catherine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. Amabat, amare timebat. And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him. It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good "talking." By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty. But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness.--Ch. 22 The relationship between Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox shows us the importance of our connection with ourselves, each other, and the world at large. Howards End was Forsters' first critically acclaimed novel and as with many of his works, successfully adapted to the screen. Heavy in symbolism, Forster explores themes of class, repression, mysticism, sexuality, individualism, British Imperialism, and social realism. Forster was outraged by the treatment of Oscar Wilde and the treatment of homosexuals as criminals, and his essay "What I Believe" (1939) outlines much of his secular humanist views.

Using quotes from such authors he esteemed as William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman , inspired by Samuel Butler and Jane Austen , and at times evoking Thomas Hardy or D.H. Lawrence , today many of Forster's works have been translated to dozens of languages, and are widely read and studied. Edward Morgan Forster was born on 1 January 1879 in London, England to Alice Clara nï¿½e Whichelo (1855-1945) and architect Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster (1847-1880) who died soon after his son was born. Living at Rooksnest (which would later prove the model for Howards End near Stevenage in Hertfordshire) young Edward was raised by his mother, aunts, and governesses. A precocious young man, he started writing stories at the age of six. He attended the Tonbridge School in Kent County, then went on to study history, philosophy, and literature at King's College, Cambridge. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1900. Although his public school years were unhappy, at King's he blossomed under tutors and the atmosphere of intellectual freedom.

He joined groups like the Cambridge Conversazione Society, also known as the Cambridge Apostles, and met lifelong friends including Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862-1932). Many of them went on to form the Bloomsbury Group. After coming into an inheritance from his Great Aunt Marianne Thornton (1797-1887), Forster was off on his first of many trips to Europe with his mother. They visited Italy, then Greece, where Forster first experienced the Mediterranean culture he would grow to love and write about. When he was not travelling he lived with his mother at Abinger Hammer in Surrey until her death in 1944. Forster knew early on he would be a writer and was fortunate enough to not experience financial hardships. His first of many sketches, essays, and stories was printed in the Independent Review in 1904. Later, he contributed greatly to the London literary journal The Athenaeum. His first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), set in Tuscany, was followed by his Bildungsroman novel The Longest Journey (1907), Rickie Elliot being one of his most autobiographical characters.

A Room With a View (1908) was Forsters next work, a romance set in Italy, contrasted with Edwardian England's society and mores. While he started writing Maurice in 1912, it was not officially published until after his death in 1971. During World War I, while Forster was in Alexandria, Egypt serving with the Red Cross, he met and fell in love with Mohammed el Adl (1900-1922), a young tram conductor. He also penned short stories that were printed in local newspapers under his pseudonym 'Pharos'. Works inspired by this period of his life include Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922) and Pharos and Pharillon: A Novelist's Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages (1923), printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf 's Hogarth Press. Forster also spent much time in India and became well-acquainted with the conflict between the British Raj and the Indian Independence Movement of which he wrote about in A Passage to India (1924), his last novel to reach international acclaim.

In recognition he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse. Forster was deeply committed to numerous literary causes during his lifetime including PEN, the international association of writers. He was a witness for the defence in the obscenity case of D.H. Lawrence 's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. As an Honorary Fellow at Cambridge, he lectured there and was a well-known and respected figure on campus. After the death of his mother he maintained residences at Cambridge and in London. In the 1950's he worked with Eric Crozier to write the libretto to Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, based on Herman Melville 's 1924 novel of the same name. In 1953 he was awarded the Order of Companions of Honor and in 1969 given Queen Elizabeth's Order of Merit. At the age of ninety, on 7 June 1970, Edward Morgan Forster died at the home in Coventry of friend and long-time companion Robert Buckingham. Other titles by E. M.

Forster include; The Celestial Omnibus (short stories, 1914), The Eternal Moment (1928), Abinger Pageant (short stories, 1934), England's Pleasant Land (1940), The Hill of Devi (1953), and Arctic Summer (unfinished). Howards End - Reading Guides - Penguin Classics - Penguin Group (USA) Subscribe to the Penguin Classics newsletter and the general Penguin newsletter here » Howards End by E.M. Forster INTRODUCTION "The more people one knows, the easier it is to replace them. It is one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place." The place that E. M. Forster loved so deeply that he made it the centerpiece of one of his best-loved novels was a country house just north of London called Rooksnest. From the moment he moved in with his mother at age four, "I took it to my heart and hoped . . .

that I would live and die there." Much more than just a house, for Forster, Rooksnest came to represent English country valuesa connection to place, a respect for individuality, and a commitment to the contemplative lifethat were increasingly threatened by the urbanization and industrialization sweeping Edwardian England. Forster's childhood idyll was to last only ten years, for at fourteen he moved with his mother to the newly fashionable bourgeois suburb of Tonbridge Wells, home to many members of the growing business class that would become a central concern of his fiction. In Tonbridge Wells, Forster met families who, like the Wilcoxes of Howards End, were energetic capitalists focused on motorcars and moneymaking. And if Tonbridge Wells gave rise to the Wilcoxes, Cambridge was the likely birthplace of the other central family of Howards End, the Schlegels. It was as a university student at King's College that Forster was first inspired by the liberal humanism of philosopher George Moore, who advocated the contemplation of beauty and the cultivation of personal relations as a spiritual antidote to the rootless, mechanistic ethos of his age.

Forster, together with the young men who would later form the Bloomsbury group of writers (Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, among others), embraced this challenge to traditional religious morality and to the growing commercial spirit of the time. Forster spent some of his happiest days in this company, a lifestyle mirrored in the Schlegels' passion for art, friendship, and the life of the mind. Yet, like the Schlegel sisters, he was not completely satisfied by life among the London literati. More importantly, he was starting to understand the practicality of conformist values, of "social conventions, economic trend, efficiency," and he grew acutely aware of the limitations of liberal ideals. The Bloomsbury group's sitting-room debates and fashionable walking-parties were for Forster too narrow, too disdainful of the economic and material conditions that made their way of life possible. Against this backdrop, the character of Margaret emergedher curious attraction to Henry, her appreciation of money, her pragmatism.

Unlike her sister Helen, whose brief entrancement with the dynamic Wilcox men quickly evolves into contempt for them, Margaret, like the man who created her, envisions a marriage of soul and body, country and city, passion and prose, culture and commerce. While Forster created the Wilcox and Schlegel families and the England they inhabit from his own experiences, the interior lives of Leonard Bast and Jacky were drawn purely from imagination. Leonard, a poor insurance clerk only a few steps removed from his rural, working-class roots, hopes to "come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus." To Forster, who believed that "the character of the English is essentially middle-class," it was people like Leonard and the Wilcoxesaspiring to wealth, political power, and culturewho would eventually "inherit" England, not the dying aristocratic class of the Schlegels nor the working classes. Forster used Leonard's connection with the Schlegels as the social conscience of the book.

As critic Wilfred Stone wrote, "Just as [Leonard] stands on the edge of the social �abyss,' so he affords the Schlegels a glimpse into it increasing both their 'panic and emptiness' and their guilt over class and money." Because Forster did not keep comprehensive journals during his most fertile period as a writer and later destroyed some of his diaries, it is not possible to trace the entire composition of Howards End. It is known that the outline for the book crystallized sometime in 1908, about two years after Forster made a trip to the countryside to spend time with the Postens, an oddly matched stockbroker and his clever, cultured second wife who provided the immediate model for the relationship between Henry and Margaret. In a journal entry of February 1910, Forster wrote, "Am grinding out my novel into a contrast between money and deaththe latter is truly an ally of the personal against the mechanical." Clearly the advancing machine age was at the forefront of Forster's consciousness at the time. With the social issues of man versus machine, country versus city, and culture versus money weighing on his mind, Forster completed his fourth novel.

Published in November 1910, Howards End was greeted with glorious reviews, making Forster a literary star. Over the years, Howards End has remained one of Forster's most beloved novels. Few works combine social comedy and political commentary with the skillful characterizations seen in the Schlegel sisters. Writing during a time of lively discussion about his country's socioeconomic conditions, Forster conceived the work as a "condition-of-England novel," a work designed to enter Edwardian debates about wealth and poverty, art and pragmatism, country life and urban sprawl that would not have sounded unfamiliar in Thatcher's England or Reagan's America. Forster, with a comic suspicion of the dogmas championed by liberals and conservatives alike, provides a distinctly humanistic perspective on some of the central debates of his time and ours. Ultimately, Howards End is the most optimistic expression of Forster's unique vision, a sensibility that transcends the temporal confines of his novel. Its richly drawn characters and the struggles they faceto maintain human connection in an increasingly depersonalized society, to find a spiritual home in the worldare still as current as they were at the beginning of the twentieth century.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS The differences between the two Schlegel sisters are highlighted in their reactions to Beethoven: Helen "can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood," while Margaret "can see only the music." Discuss the disparity in their outlooks and how this leads to disagreements, for example, over Leonard Bast and Henry Wilcox. Given Forster's portrayal of Henry Wilcox, what do you think attracts Margaret to him? Why does she accept his proposal of marriage, even though she admits to her sister that she does not love him? Does she grow to love him in the end? Compared to more radical modernist contemporaries like D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford, Forster's retention of the omniscient narrator appears conservative and traditional. Yet the narrator's "omniscience" is distinctively qualified and tentative: "It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not." Whose viewpoint (or viewpoints) does the narrator convey?

The juxtaposition of masculine principles (money, logic, conquest, the external life) and feminine principles (spirit, intuition, accommodation, the inner life) is perhaps best embodied in the characters of Henry and Helen. Margaret, however, is less stereotypically feminine and maternal, saying "I do not love children. I am thankful I have none." The narrator tells us that "On the whole she sided with men as they are." When Margaret ultimately "charged straight through these Wilcoxes" and united Helen and Henry at Howards End, was it a victory in the masculine or feminine mode? Leonard Bast is portrayed as a spiritual orphan, "sucked into the town" and loosed from the moorings of his working-class origins. Are the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels responsible for his death? To what extent is his ascent from poverty hindered by his own personal limitations and ambitions? Although Forster's work is not conventionally religious, he frequently expresses a deep spirituality. Discuss the spiritual outlook expressed in Margaret's contemplation on love (Chapter XX), Mrs.

Wilcox's bond with the English countryside, and Helen's "mind that readily shreds the visible." "I'm brokenI'm ended," says Henry Wilcox as he contemplates his son's imminent arrest near the end of the book. Has Henry in fact changed at the end of the novel? Have his values been transformed by his marriage to Margaret? Before their marriage the narrator asserts that Henry "did alter her charactera little." Is that true? In the final chapter, Margaret and Helen's vista from Howards End is spoiled only by the "red rust" in the distance, the mark of London encroaching on the pristine landscape. Discuss Forster's view of technology and his hope for a civilization that will "rest on the earth." Images of water are repeatedly evoked in Howards End to suggest the dynamic ebb and flow of life, "progress," and the rush of time. London is a place where "all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, [are] streaming away." Contrast these images with the farm house, wych-elm, and meadow that bind the characters to the earth and the past.

"More and more," Margaret protests, "do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it. . . . Hurray for riches!" Margaret's vigorous defense of the material basis of her lifestyle, a defense that shocks some of her family and friends, reflects Forster's own reexamination of the antibusiness, antimaterialist sentiments he had imbibed during his university education. How do her comments highlight the limitations of both the intellectuals' and the capitalists' attitudes toward wealth? Why can't she and her family ultimately help the Leonard Basts of the world let alone the "unthinkable" poorer classesfinancially? On the surface, Ruth Wilcox is very different from Margaret Schlegel: unworldly, apolitical, more easily accepting of her husband's ways and views. On what basis does she sense such a close bond with Margaret and come to see her as the proper "spiritual heir" of Howards End? What does Margaret mean when she says to Helen, "I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman's mind"? ABOUT E.M.

FORSTER Edward Morgan Forster was born on New Year's Day, 1879, in Dorset Square, London, the second child (the first died soon after birth) of middle-class parents, Edward Llewellyn Forster, a Cambridge graduate and architect, and Alice Clara "Lily" Whichelo. When his son was just one, Forster's father died after a long battle with consumption, leaving the family little money and making Lily a widow at twenty-five. Unwilling to live with relatives and unable to afford a London apartment, Lily moved to a house in the English countryside, Rooksnest, where she devoted herself to her son. At Rooksnest, Forster's life was spent in the nurturing, overprotective "haze of elderly ladies" that included paternal aunts and Lily's friends, and he formed a deep emotional attachment to the place, drawing later on the memories for Howards End. When Forster was fourteen years old, he and Lily faced the disheartening news that their lease at Rooksnest was up, and they sadly moved to the suburb of Tonbridge Wells. Here, Forster attended the boarding school as a day boy, with classics as his major study.

At Tonbridge he wrote for the school newspaper and won several awards for his essays, but nonetheless it was here, a place that contrasted so sharply with his happy home life, where his feelings of being an outsider hardened into an abiding distaste for the English school system. Forster's intellectual and social life blossomed when, in 1897, he entered King's College, Cambridge. With the guidance and encouragement of his classics professor, Forster grew to admire the modern European writers Tolstoy, Proust, and Ibsen, and began to test his own powers as a writer. It was during these years, too, that he first began to acknowledge his homosexuality, falling in love with another undergraduate, H. O. Meredith, who would be the center of his posthumously published novel Maurice (finished in 1914). Meredith helped Forster become a member of the "Apostles," the university's foremost discussion group, where he formed friendships with many of the intellectuals later associated with the Bloomsbury group in London.

In 1901, with his formal education over and uncertain about a career, Forster, accompanied by Lily, set off on a year-long trip to Italy to study Italian history, language, art, and literature, and to work on a novel-in-progress. In 1903 he published his first short story, "Albergo Empedocle," and soon thereafter started to write for the Independent Review, a social and political journal founded by his Cambridge friends, to which he would contribute regularly for many years. His first three published novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908) received generally favorable reviews and made him a minor literary celebrity, but not until the publication of Howards End (1910) did Forster achieve major acclaim as a writer. During 1912 and 1913 Forster journeyed to India, beginning a lifelong fascination with the subcontinent. A return journey to India in 1921 provided the inspiration for A Passage to India (1924), which was hailed as a masterpiece on publication.

After writing five novels in succession, then ending a fourteen-year hiatus with A Passage to India, Forster retired as a novelist at the age of forty-five. He spent the second half of his life as a voracious reader, reviewer, and supporter of young writers such as J. R. Ackerley and Eudora Welty. A prominent public intellectual, Forster became the first president of England's National Council on Civil Liberties and was a lifelong spokesman for personal and political tolerance, testifying in the trial that successfully overturned the ban on D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. King's College awarded Forster an honorary fellowship in 1946, and he spent the rest of his years in Cambridge. Leading an active literary and social life to the end, Forster died in 1970 at age 91.

Question: Who wrote the novel 'Howards End'?
Answer: E.M. FORSTER